Individual Differences in Slow-Wave-Sleep Predict Acquisition of Full Cognitive Maps

Abstract

Accumulating evidence suggests that sleep, and particularly Slow-Wave-Sleep (SWS), helps the implicit and explicit extraction of regularities within memories that were encoded in a previous wake period. Sleep following training on virtual navigation was also shown to improve performance in subsequent navigation tests. Some studies propose that this sleep-effect on navigation is based on explicit recognition of landmarks; however, it is possible that SWS-dependent extraction of implicit spatiotemporal regularities contributes as well. To examine this possibility, we administered a novel virtual navigation task in which participants were required to walk through a winding corridor and then choose one of five marked doors to exit. Unknown to participants, the markings on the correct door reflected the corridor’s shape (from a bird’s eye view). Detecting this regularity negates the need to find the exit by trial and error. Participants performed the task twice a day for a week, while their overnight sleep was monitored. We found that the more time participants spent in SWS across the week, the better they were able to implicitly extract the hidden regularity. In contrast, the few participants that explicitly realized the regularity did not rely on SWS to do so. Moreover, the SWS effect was strictly at the trait-level: Baseline levels of SWS prior to the experimental week could predict success just as well, but day-to-day variations in SWS did not predict day-to-day improvements. We propose that our findings indicate SWS facilitates implicit integration of new information into cognitive maps, possibly through compressed memory replay.

Impact of Obstructive Sleep Apnea on Cognitive and Motor Functions in Parkinson's Disease

“…Also, it is to be noted that our results showed that the non‐REM N3 sleep stage was of a lower percentage in the PD + OSA group. Non‐REM N3 is known to be the slow‐wave sleep (SWS), 57 and the reduction of this sleep stage is associated with a higher risk of cognitive decline 58,59 . Another mechanism by which OSA may influence cognition in PD patients is via increasing the risk of certain comorbidities, including mainly hypertension and heart diseases, as better cardiovascular health was found to be directly associated with better cognitive functions 60 .…”

Transcranial Current Stimulation During Sleep Facilitates Insight into Temporal Rules, but does not Consolidate Memories of Individual Sequential Experiences

“…28 , past findings concerning sleep-induced insight are often characterized by a hidden rule having a temporal structure: event X at time t predicts event Y at some time-point in the future, typically a few seconds later. This type of hidden regularities are not easily identified in real time; however, during SWS, endogenous reactivations of these experiences, occurring in a time-compressed manner 1,38 , essentially bring event X and Y closer together in time and could thus allow Hebbian mechanisms – or other activity-dependent local plasticity processes in the hippocampus – to more readily associate them directly 39,40 . These associations can potentially form the basis of conscious identification of the hidden rule by the prefrontal cortex when performing the task again the following morning.…”

Connecting sleep, the neurocognitive memory system, and Bourdieu's habitus concept: Is sleep a generative force of the habitus?

“…Additionally, the relevance of sleep for implicitly extracting hidden rules has been described in other tasks such as extracting group hierarchies from relations within pairs (Ellenbogen, Hu, Payne, Titone, & Walker, 2007), or in spatial contexts (Lerner & Gluck, 2018). Finally, the capacity of sleep to extract abstract rules also works in probabilistic paradigms (Djonlagic et al., 2009).…”